Nicholas Negroponte is getting all sorts of attention for his plan to sell Linux PCs to the developing world at $100/each. (The picture is from the EnGadget story.)
It sounds great, in theory. Although, as EnGadget notes, most people in those parts might prefer mobile phones, and they're already cheap as chips. (As we noted last week, literally.)
Negroponte might respond he's bringing poor people the full world of the World Wide Web with his cheap box, but if it's the Web you want you need connectivity, not just a box, and getting to fiber in Niger is a little more difficult than getting to it from, say, Atlanta. (Or Abidjan for that matter.)
But there is one more big problem with this "great futurist's" vision.
It's practically here already.
Fry's is already selling an AMD Linux desktop for $199. It was in my newspaper this morning, and I found it within minutes at Fry's Outpost.Com.
This is a 2.2 GHz machine based on AMD's Sempron processor. It doesn't have a monitor and the company is claiming a limit of 1 per household. But remember, that's a retail price. (Admittedly a retailer with buying power.)
Still...how far are we from a $100 PC?
Not very far at all.
The whole problem of getting connectivity in the "developing world" (I hope we have not stopped developing here) is not really that much of a problem. Considering the low cost of real estate and lack of zoning in many such places, one could build a wireless network for pennies on the dollar compared to the "developed world." As for backhaul to the internet, satellite connectivity has become quite cheap. Sure, such a system will have latency issues and will not provide 10Mbps to every user, but it will be enough and better than what many people have in the US.
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